Living in the Border Regime: The Governance and Aesthetics of Mobility Restricted; Files Only
Ma, Stephanie (Spring 2026)
Abstract
The border is commonly taken to be simply a nation’s territorial boundary. At this very threshold between inside and outside, the state exercises its sovereignty to admit or exclude those who seek to enter its territory. However, contemporary practices of border control no longer fit this narrow understanding. This paper claims that the border today functions as a regime that governs mobility through regulatory technologies and institutions, and at the same time as an aesthetic that produces differential visibility of movement. Mobility is therefore not merely modulated by the border regime but also shaped through it. In Chapter 1, by demonstrating how border technologies unfold through continuous processes of classification and screening across different spaces, I reconceptualize the border as dispersed zones that operate through a logic of managing and optimizing circulation. Chapter 2 examines the expansion of the border regime along spatial, temporal, and systemic dimensions, through the proliferation and intensification of practices such as the externalization of border control. Chapter 3 theorizes the border as an aesthetic that produces a differentiated field of perception, in which certain mobilities appear normal while others are seen as threatening. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the possibility of contestation. Specifically, I consider how the exposing gaze can denaturalize the aesthetic framework, and how acts of political appearance can disrupt the distribution of visibility structured by this aesthetic.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Border: Floating Spaces and Technologies of Governance
1.1 Beyond the Lines: Airport and Border Zones
1.2 The Operating Logic of Border: A Foucauldian Analysis
Chapter 2: The Expanding Border Regime
2.1 From Apparatus to Regime: The Border as a Framework of Governance
2.2 Spatial Expansion: The Externalization of Borders
2.3 Temporal Expansion: The Suspending Status and Indefinite Present
2.4 Systemic Expansion: Intensification of the Operating Grid
2.5 The Production of Otherness
Chapter 3: Ordering the Visible: Aesthetics and the Border Spectacle
3.1 Visibility as Knowledge
3.2 Aesthetics of Border Regime: The Differential Ordering of Visibility
3.3 The Border Spectacle
Chapter 4: Resistance Within the Border Regime
4.1 The Exposing Gaze: Denaturalizing the Border Regime
4.2 Political Appearance: Enacting Equality in Moments of Rupture
Conclusion
Bibliography
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File download under embargo until 28 May 2028 | 2026-04-08 01:23:42 -0400 | File download under embargo until 28 May 2028 |
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